The Top Three WooCommerce Extensions to Manage Sales Tax

In the last few months, sales tax collection has suddenly become a lot more complicated. Like, a lot more complicated. A Supreme Court ruling from this June has allowed for state-by-state legislation that requires businesses to pay the applicable sales tax on e-commerce transactions within the state, regardless of the business’ physical presence in the state. This means if your business in St. Louis sells to a customer in San Diego, you have to pay the San Diego sales tax.

This also means that you have countless tax rates to keep track of. State, county, and city tax laws are changing all the time. Who has time to keep track of them all?

Luckily, there are lots of automated tax options that integrate with WooCommerce. For the most basic handling of your taxes, WooCommerce has its own free extension that will simply calculate the correct tax rate based on your customer’s location; however, if you are selling from more than one location or if you are looking for any further tax assistance, you’ll need to look into a third-party tax extension.

But you’re busy. You have a store to run. The last thing you want to do is worry about is messing up your taxes, so let one of these WooCommerce extensions handle calculating sales taxes for you.

TaxJar does it all—for a price. The extension will calculate the applicable US or Canadian sales tax based off of rates that they update monthly, meaning no more manually filling out tax rate CSVs. Then, each day, they compile everything you owe by state, county, and city. For an additional fee, TaxJar will even file your sales tax returns for you so you don’t have to keep track off all the different due dates.

AvaTax provides similar services to TaxJar, but with a bit more customization. You can set tax exemptions for particular orders and assign and apply individual tax schedules to your customers. AvaTax will also allow you to manually submit transactions that are paid with cash or check so that AvaTax can calculate the tax rate and keep all your tax data in one place.

For your subscription customers, AvaTax is the only WooCommerce plugin that can handle the difference between an initial order tax versus a renewal tax, so your customer won’t end up paying unnecessary taxes. AvaTax can also manage your sales tax compliance across multiple companies for no extra cost.

Simple Sales Tax is completely free, which is always a plus. It can still calculate sales tax, give you regular tax reports, and supports tax exemptions. However, Simple Sales Tax currently only supports automatic sales tax filing for 24 states. So if your looking for an all-in-one plugin, it might not be right for you.

Sales tax might look complicated, but with help from WooCommerce and a sales tax extension, compliance and filing can be a breeze. Plus, with managed hosting from Pressable, our expert support staff are always on hand to ensure all of your WordPress and WooCommerce extensions and plugins stay up-to-date.

Now that you have taxes under control, you can start driving traffic to your WooCommerce store with these SEO-boosting tips!